OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lane Detection and Classification using Cascaded CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Lane detection is extremely important for autonomous vehicles. For this reason, many approaches use lane boundary information to locate the vehicle inside the street, or to integrate GPS-based localization. As many other computer vision based tasks, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) represent the state-of-the-art technology to indentify lane boundaries. However, the position of the lane boundaries w.r.t. the vehicle may not suffice for a reliable positioning, as for path planning or localization information regarding lane types may also be needed. In this work, we present an end-to-end system for lane boundary identification, clustering and classification, based on two cascaded neural networks, that runs in real-time. To build the system, 14336 lane boundaries instances of the TuSimple dataset for lane detection have been labelled using 8 different classes. Our dataset and the code for inference are available online.
Knowledge Graph Embedding for Ecotoxicological Effect Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Exploring the effects a chemical compound has on a species takes a considerable experimental effort. Appropriate methods for estimating and suggesting new effects can dramatically reduce the work needed to be done by a laboratory. In this paper we explore the suitability of using a knowledge graph embedding approach for ecotoxicological effect prediction. A knowledge graph has been constructed from publicly available data sets, including a species taxonomy and chemical classification and similarity. The publicly available effect data is integrated to the knowledge graph using ontology alignment techniques. Our experimental results show that the knowledge graph based approach improves the selected baselines.
Applying Transfer Learning To Deep Learned Models For EEG Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The introduction of deep learning and transfer learning techniques in fields such as computer vision allowed a leap forward in the accuracy of image classification tasks. Currently there is only limited use of such techniques in neuroscience. The challenge of using deep learning methods to successfully train models in neuroscience, lies in the complexity of the information that is processed, the availability of data and the cost of producing sufficient high quality annotations. Inspired by its application in computer vision, we introduce transfer learning on electrophysiological data to enable training a model with limited amounts of data. Our method was tested on the dataset of the BCI competition IV 2a and compared to the top results that were obtained using traditional machine learning techniques. Using our DL model we outperform the top result of the competition by 33%. We also explore transferability of knowledge between trained models over different experiments, called inter-experimental transfer learning. This reduces the amount of required data even further and is especially useful when few subjects are available. This method is able to outperform the standard deep learning methods used in the BCI competition IV 2b approaches by 18%. In this project we propose a method that can produce reliable electroencephalography (EEG) signal classification, based on modest amounts of training data through the use of transfer learning.
The Ethical Dilemma when (not) Setting up Cost-based Decision Rules in Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Neural networks for semantic segmentation can be seen as statistical models that provide for each pixel of one image a probability distribution on predefined classes. The predicted class is then usually obtained by the maximum a-posteriori probability (MAP) which is known as Bayes rule in decision theory. From decision theory we also know that the Bayes rule is optimal regarding the simple symmetric cost function. Therefore, it weights each type of confusion between two different classes equally, e.g., given images of urban street scenes there is no distinction in the cost function if the network confuses a person with a street or a building with a tree. Intuitively, there might be confusions of classes that are more important to avoid than others. In this work, we want to raise awareness of the possibility of explicitly defining confusion costs and the associated ethical difficulties if it comes down to providing numbers. We define two cost functions from different extreme perspectives, an egoistic and an altruistic one, and show how safety relevant quantities like precision / recall and (segment-wise) false positive / negative rate change when interpolating between MAP, egoistic and altruistic decision rules.
Predictive Network Control in Multi-Connectivity Mobility for URLLC Services
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper proposes a centralized predictive flow controller to handle multi-connectivity for ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) services. The prediction is based on channel state information (CSI) and buffer state reports from the system nodes. For this, we extend CSI availability to a packet data convergence protocol (PDCP) controller. The controller captures CSI in a discrete time Markov chain (DTMC). The DTMC is used to predict forwarding decisions over a finite time horizon. The novel mathematical model optimizes over finite trajectories based on a linear program. The results show performance improvements in a multi-layer small cell mobility scenario in terms of end-to-end (E2E) throughput. Furthermore, 5G new radio (NR) complaint system level simulations (SLS) and results are shown for dual connectivity as well as for the general multi-connectivity case.
Training Auto-encoder-based Optimizers for Terahertz Image Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Terahertz (THz) sensing is a promising imaging technology for a wide variety of different applications. Extracting the interpretable and physically meaningful parameters for such applications, however, requires solving an inverse problem in which a model function determined by these parameters needs to be fitted to the measured data. Since the underlying optimization problem is nonconvex and very costly to solve, we propose learning the prediction of suitable parameters from the measured data directly. More precisely, we develop a model-based autoencoder in which the encoder network predicts suitable parameters and the decoder is fixed to a physically meaningful model function, such that we can train the encoding network in an unsupervised way. We illustrate numerically that the resulting network is more than 140 times faster than classical optimization techniques while making predictions with only slightly higher objective values. Using such predictions as starting points of local optimization techniques allows us to converge to better local minima about twice as fast as optimization without the network-based initialization.
Resource Management and Admission Control for Tactile Internet in Next Generation of RAN
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, a new queuing model for the Tactile Internet (TI) is proposed for the cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture of the next generation wireless networks, e.g., 5G, assisted via orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology. This model includes both the radio remote head (RRH) and baseband processing unit (BBU) queuing delays and reliability for each end to end (E2E) connection between each pair of tactile users. For this setup, with the aim to minimize the transmit power of users subject to guaranteeing tolerable delay of users, and fronthaul and access limitations, we formulate a resource allocation problem. Since the proposed optimization problem is highly non-convex, to solve it in an efficient manner, we utilize diverse transformation techniques such as successive convex approximation (SCA) and difference of two convex functions (DC). In addition, we propose an admission control (AC) algorithm to make problem feasible. In our proposed system model, we dynamically adjust the fronthaul and access links to minimize the transmit power. Simulation results reveal that by dynamic adjustment of the access and fronthaul delays, transmit power can be saved compared to the case of fixed approach per each transmission session. Moreover, the number of rejected users in the network is significantly reduced and more users are accepted.
Analysis of the Synergy between Modularity and Autonomy in an Artificial Intelligence Based Fleet Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

A novel approach is provided for evaluating the benefits and burdens from vehicle modularity in fleets/units through the analysis of a game theoretical model of the competition between autonomous vehicle fleets in an attacker-defender game. We present an approach to obtain the heuristic operational strategies through fitting a decision tree on high-fidelity simulation results of an intelligent agent-based model. A multi-stage game theoretical model is also created for decision making considering military resources and impacts of past decisions. Nash equilibria of the operational strategy are revealed, and their characteristics are explored. The benefits of fleet modularity are also analyzed by comparing the results of the decision making process under diverse operational situations.
Constructing large scale biomedical knowledge bases from scratch with rapid annotation of interpretable patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Knowledge base construction is crucial for summarising, understanding and inferring relationships between biomedical entities. However, for many practical applications such as drug discovery, the scarcity of relevant facts (e.g. gene X is therapeutic target for disease Y) severely limits a domain expert's ability to create a usable knowledge base, either directly or by training a relation extraction model. In this paper, we present a simple and effective method of extracting new facts with a pre-specified binary relationship type from the biomedical literature, without requiring any training data or hand-crafted rules. Our system discovers, ranks and presents the most salient patterns to domain experts in an interpretable form. By marking patterns as compatible with the desired relationship type, experts indirectly batch-annotate candidate pairs whose relationship is expressed with such patterns in the literature. Even with a complete absence of seed data, experts are able to discover thousands of high-quality pairs with the desired relationship within minutes. When a small number of relevant pairs do exist - even when their relationship is more general (e.g. gene X is biologically associated with disease Y) than the relationship of interest - our system leverages them in order to i) learn a better ranking of the patterns to be annotated or ii) generate weakly labelled pairs in a fully automated manner. We evaluate our method both intrinsically and via a downstream knowledge base completion task, and show that it is an effective way of constructing knowledge bases when few or no relevant facts are already available.
Generalized Random Surfer-Pair Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

SimRank is a widely studied link-based similarity measure that is known for its simple, yet powerful philosophy that two nodes are similar if they are referenced by similar nodes. While this philosophy has been the basis of several improvements, there is another useful, albeit less frequently discussed interpretation for SimRank known as the Random Surfer-Pair Model. In this work, we show that other well known measures related to SimRank can also be reinterpreted using Random Surfer-Pair Models, and establish a mathematically sound, general and unifying framework for several link-based similarity measures. This also serves to provide new insights into their functioning and allows for using these measures in a Monte Carlo framework, which provides several computational benefits. Next, we describe how the framework can be used as a versatile tool for developing measures according to given design requirements. As an illustration of this utility, we develop a new measure by combining the benefits of two existing measures under this framework, and empirically demonstrate that it results in a better performing measure.
Enhancing Email Functionality using Late Bound Content
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Email is one of the most successful computer applications yet devised. Communication features in email, however, have remained relatively static in years. We investigate one way of expanding email functionality without modifying the existing email infrastructure. We introduce email late bound content, a simple and generalizable technique that defers message content binding through image lazy-loading. Parts of an email are converted into external images embedded in HTML code snippets, making it so that email clients will defer the image download (i.e. content binding) until the moment users open the email. This late bound content allows email senders and third party services to update delivered emails. To illustrate the utilities of late bound content, we present four new example features and discuss the tradeoffs of email content late binding.
Landmark Assisted CycleGAN for Cartoon Face Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we are interested in generating an cartoon face of a person by using unpaired training data between real faces and cartoon ones. A major challenge of this task is that the structures of real and cartoon faces are in two different domains, whose appearance differs greatly from each other. Without explicit correspondence, it is difficult to generate a high quality cartoon face that captures the essential facial features of a person. In order to solve this problem, we propose landmark assisted CycleGAN, which utilizes face landmarks to define landmark consistency loss and to guide the training of local discriminator in CycleGAN. To enforce structural consistency in landmarks, we utilize the conditional generator and discriminator. Our approach is capable to generate high-quality cartoon faces even indistinguishable from those drawn by artists and largely improves state-of-the-art.
Tight Sensitivity Bounds For Smaller Coresets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

An $\varepsilon$-coreset for Least-Mean-Squares (LMS) of a matrix $A\in{\mathbb{R}}^{n\times d}$ is a small weighted subset of its rows that approximates the sum of squared distances from its rows to every affine $k$-dimensional subspace of ${\mathbb{R}}^d$, up to a factor of $1\pm\varepsilon$. Such coresets are useful for hyper-parameter tuning and solving many least-mean-squares problems such as low-rank approximation ($k$-SVD), $k$-PCA, Lassso/Ridge/Linear regression and many more. Coresets are also useful for handling streaming, dynamic and distributed big data in parallel. With high probability, non-uniform sampling based on upper bounds on what is known as importance or sensitivity of each row in $A$ yields a coreset. The size of the (sampled) coreset is then near-linear in the total sum of these sensitivity bounds. We provide algorithms that compute provably \emph{tight} bounds for the sensitivity of each input row. It is based on two ingredients: (i) iterative algorithm that computes the exact sensitivity of each point up to arbitrary small precision for (non-affine) $k$-subspaces, and (ii) a general reduction of independent interest from computing sensitivity for the family of affine $k$-subspaces in ${\mathbb{R}}^d$ to (non-affine) $(k+1)$- subspaces in ${\mathbb{R}}^{d+1}$. Experimental results on real-world datasets, including the English Wikipedia documents-term matrix, show that our bounds provide significantly smaller and data-dependent coresets also in practice. Full open source is also provided.
Extended Report on the Obfuscated Integration of Software Protections
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

To counter man-at-the-end attacks such as reverse engineering and tampering, software is often protected with techniques that require support modules to be linked into the application. It is well-known, however, that attackers can exploit the modular nature of applications and their protections to speed up the identification and comprehension process of the relevant code, the assets, and the applied protections. To counter that exploitation of modularity at different levels of granularity, the boundaries between the modules in the program need to be obfuscated. We propose to do so by combining three cross-boundary protection techniques that thwart the disassembly process and in particular the reconstruction of functions: code layout randomization, interprocedurally coupled opaque predicates, and code factoring with intraprocedural control flow idioms. By means of an elaborate experimental evaluation and an extensive sensitivity analysis on realistic use cases and state-of-the-art tools, we demonstrate our technique's potency and resilience to advanced attacks. All relevant code is publicly available online.
Evolution of Technologies and Multivalued Circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2019
Year: 2019

For more than 45 years, many multi-valued circuits have been presented. With very rare exceptions, they have been unsuccessful for fundamental reasons that can be explained. Each time a new circuit technology is presented, a lot of new MVL circuits are proposed. Can new circuit technologies overcome the fundamental disadvantages of MVL circuits? The evolution of IC technologies in the last decades unfortunately increases the disadvantage of MVL circuits versus binary ones. For non conventional technologies, only quantum devices look promising, even if implementation is challenging and applications are restricted to a small niche.
Combating the Filter Bubble: Designing for Serendipity in a University Course Recommendation System
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Collaborative filtering based algorithms, including Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), tend towards predicting a perpetuation of past observed behavior. In a recommendation context, this can lead to an overly narrow set of suggestions lacking in serendipity and inadvertently placing the user in what is known as a "filter bubble." In this paper, we grapple with the issue of the filter bubble in the context of a course recommendation system in production at a public university. Most universities in the United States encourage students to explore developing interests while simultaneously advising them to adhere to course taking norms which progress them towards graduation. These competing objectives, and the stakes involved for students, make this context a particularly meaningful one for investigating real-world recommendation strategies. We introduce a novel modification to the skip-gram model applied to nine years of historic course enrollment sequences to learn course vector representations used to diversify recommendations based on similarity to a student's specified favorite course. This model, which we call multifactor2vec, is intended to improve the semantics of the primary token embedding by also learning embeddings of potentially conflated factors of the token (e.g., instructor). Our offline testing found this model improved accuracy and recall on our course similarity and analogy validation sets over a standard skip-gram. Incorporating course catalog description text resulted in further improvements. We compare the performance of these models to the system's existing RNN-based recommendations with a user study of undergraduates (N = 70) rating six characteristics of their course recommendations. Results of the user study show a dramatic lack of novelty in RNN recommendations and depict the characteristic trade-offs that make serendipity difficult to achieve.
Learning from satisfying assignments under continuous distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

What kinds of functions are learnable from their satisfying assignments? Motivated by this simple question, we extend the framework of De, Diakonikolas, and Servedio [DDS15], which studied the learnability of probability distributions over $\{0,1\}^n$ defined by the set of satisfying assignments to "low-complexity" Boolean functions, to Boolean-valued functions defined over continuous domains. In our learning scenario there is a known "background distribution" $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathbb{R}^n$ (such as a known normal distribution or a known log-concave distribution) and the learner is given i.i.d. samples drawn from a target distribution $\mathcal{D}_f$, where $\mathcal{D}_f$ is $\mathcal{D}$ restricted to the satisfying assignments of an unknown low-complexity Boolean-valued function $f$. The problem is to learn an approximation $\mathcal{D}'$ of the target distribution $\mathcal{D}_f$ which has small error as measured in total variation distance. We give a range of efficient algorithms and hardness results for this problem, focusing on the case when $f$ is a low-degree polynomial threshold function (PTF). When the background distribution $\mathcal{D}$ is log-concave, we show that this learning problem is efficiently solvable for degree-1 PTFs (i.e.,~linear threshold functions) but not for degree-2 PTFs. In contrast, when $\mathcal{D}$ is a normal distribution, we show that this learning problem is efficiently solvable for degree-2 PTFs but not for degree-4 PTFs. Our hardness results rely on standard assumptions about secure signature schemes.
Introducing Astrocytes on a Neuromorphic Processor: Synchronization, Local Plasticity and Edge of Chaos
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

While there is still a lot to learn about astrocytes and their neuromodulatory role in the spatial and temporal integration of neuronal activity, their introduction to neuromorphic hardware is timely, facilitating their computational exploration in basic science questions as well as their exploitation in real-world applications. Here, we present an astrocytic module that enables the development of a spiking Neuronal-Astrocytic Network (SNAN) into Intel's Loihi neuromorphic chip. The basis of the Loihi module is an end-to-end biophysically plausible compartmental model of an astrocyte that simulates the intracellular activity in response to the synaptic activity in space and time. To demonstrate the functional role of astrocytes in SNAN, we describe how an astrocyte may sense and induce activity-dependent neuronal synchronization, switch on and off spike-time-dependent plasticity (STDP) to introduce single-shot learning, and monitor the transition between ordered and chaotic activity at the synaptic space. Our module may serve as an extension for neuromorphic hardware, by either replicating or exploring the distinct computational roles that astrocytes have in forming biological intelligence.
Evolving the Hearthstone Meta
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Balancing an ever growing strategic game of high complexity, such as Hearthstone is a complex task. The target of making strategies diverse and customizable results in a delicate intricate system. Tuning over 2000 cards to generate the desired outcome without disrupting the existing environment becomes a laborious challenge. In this paper, we discuss the impacts that changes to existing cards can have on strategy in Hearthstone. By analyzing the win rate on match-ups across different decks, being played by different strategies, we propose to compare their performance before and after changes are made to improve or worsen different cards. Then, using an evolutionary algorithm, we search for a combination of changes to the card attributes that cause the decks to approach equal, 50% win rates. We then expand our evolutionary algorithm to a multi-objective solution to search for this result, while making the minimum amount of changes, and as a consequence disruption, to the existing cards. Lastly, we propose and evaluate metrics to serve as heuristics with which to decide which cards to target with balance changes.